Course1104: Culture-Gender in InterAsia: Work, Sexuality, Religion

This course has taken shape within an inter-Asia context in the belief that our present moment poses a series of new questions to the previous articulation of gender-culture issues that has now entered into feminist commonsense.

The antithetical relationship between modernity and culture produced by nationalist discourse in the non-Western world has implied the linking of women with the cultural and the authentic. Feminisms in Asia were first aligned with and then critical of nationalism; while they raised the question of culture, they also tended to see it as antithetical to modernity of which feminism was a part. Therefore, in order to ask the culture question in all its complexity - so that it becomes part of the investigation of our modernity rather than lying outside of it - there has to be a re-complication of the ways in which gender perspectives deal with culture.

The course will ask what valency the existing conceptual legacies have as we are confronted with unprecedented changes in the way gender is being thematised across the social domain. We have selected three aspects of that domain – work, sexuality, religion/custom – through which to explore the new analytical frameworks feminists across Asia are putting forward.

Revisiting and rethinking the relationship between the concepts Gender and Culture might show how to reconfigure both our theory and our politics, and give us a new basis for knowledge production by opening up new objects of enquiry and new terrains of investigation.

Course format: The course will run for 5 days, 10 am to 5 pm. Mornings will be devoted to instructor presentations and discussion of required readings. Afternoons will be for group activities and question sessions. Face-to-face instruction will be supplemented by online work on the CSCS Moodle platform. All course readings are available on this platform, and students will get their login details on enrolment. Below is an indicative list from which the readings will be finalised. Required as distinct from Recommended Readings will be announced a month before the course begins.

Day 2 – Work

Areas of interest:

●Globalisation and the “feminisation” of workplaces

●Sexuality and the workplace – the inter-Asia experience

●Sex work

Readings:

●Cho Haejoang, “'You are entrapped in an imaginary well': the formation of subjectivity within compressed development - a feminist critique of modernity and Korean culture”, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 1:1, 49-69

●Tani Barlow, “Buying In: Advertising and the Sexy Modern Girl Icon in Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s”, in Tani Barlow et al (eds.), The Modern Girl around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization, Duke University Press, 2008